Common Vision for Real Transformation
Citizenship
Self-determination
Inclusion and community engagement
Individual and family empowerment
Empowerment is a process whereby people gradually gain more control and participation in their lives.
The value of empowerment is that it enables us to understand what helps families and what doesn't. Using empowerment as a lens, we learn that facilitating power and participation for individuals and families is enhanced when advocacy, independent planning/facilitation, allocation of funding, and direct services operate as separate functions in the system. In this way, individuals have more control over their lives with the help of family, support networks, and a facilitator. Separating these functions also enables people to build their own capacities and networks, and have more power within the system.
Empowerment is also enhanced when people have the opportunity to access valued resources that satisfy basic human needs. This value builds on the assumption that a transformed system must shift power to vulnerable citizens by paying attention to creating positive circumstances for participation and the expression of self-determination.
The void in our society has been produced by the absence of values.
John Ralston Saul
Values are the bedrock of political and social life; they are our conception of the good, of what is desirable.
Janice Gross Steins